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diff --git a/durango1.txt b/durango1.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b2f2f20 --- /dev/null +++ b/durango1.txt @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +If you hang your head back over the edge of the chair you can stare stright up at the pine needles overhead, forming a great canopy of thin black fingers reaching into the slow glow of the new moon, which just rose up from behind the western ridge. + +That was what I was doing when Corrinne and I decided that Junction Creek would be a good place to pass the month of July. Just down the hill is Durrango, which, while tourist-filled and kitchy to some degree, has some fabulous things for families -- a wonderful public library where the kids got to see the U.S. national yoyo champion (yes, reall), a really cool indoor water park masquarding as a rec center, complete with a three story water slide, a science museum, and a host of other fun stuff -- as one of the camp hosts we befriended put it, in Durango they really know how to do it. + +We also needed to have a semi-plan for the near future because my parents were coming to visit us, somewhere in Colorado (thanks for being flexible), and to be honest we were all feeling like we'd been moving a bit faster than we like. It's always enticing to see what's around the next bend, as it were, but sometimes you want to stop somewhere and just sink into the soil a bit. Junction Creek seemed like a good place to do that. + +A good part of the reason it seemed that way was because we met some really great people. You meet a lot of people traveling, especially if you have a vintage motorhome that draws people to your door on a daily basis (just last night we had dinner with a really great couple who first stopped to admire the bus). Every so often though you run across fellow travelers whom you immediately click with and we were fortunate enough to have that happened at Junction Creek. + +What I enjoy about these friendships is that long term travel[^1] acts as a kind of crucible in which the mundane is quickly melted away, you can skip past the mundane and get straight to the really fun part where you're all sharing a room with a bathroom that has no door and everyone has dysentery. Wait, no. That's not it. Or it is, but there's a whole lot there between point A and point B and only Debi and Matt really understand what all is there. + +I can say though that if Kate and Josh and their family and ours ever find ourselves in say, El Salvador, and we all have some sort of intestinal parasite it will just make for a lot of laughter. Because that's how it goes when you're traveling. Travelers above all seem to just not care about the proprieties of life and get straight to what Thoreau called the marrow, because Thoreau was a bit melodramatic. Still, it's an apt metaphor. It helps that our kids were fast friends almost instantly. Kids know what's what. + +There's something more grounded in the here and now about these friendships. We're all a little more like children perhaps, ecploring the world and knowing a little bit more what's what. It's rare to have a conversation like you have when you meet strangers in your home town. There's very little of the "what do you do?" sort of thing because out here, honestly, no one cares what you do. We tend to talk about that things around us right now. The forest, for instance. The dead pine full of fledgling pygmy chickadees. Our families. Our plans for the next few weeks, what we're doing for dinner, should we hike to the swimming hole, should we check out the rec center, could we live here, for a year, for two, forever, not at all. + +I have a few of these friendships nurtured over the years and I feel lucky to have them, I want more, but these things, you cannot seek them, maybe they come, maybe they do not, it is not for us to say. But when you find them, stop what you're doing, even if it's Vang Vieng, and enjoy them. + +So we did, for a couple of weeks, which is the longest you can stay in any one campsite in America's national forests (or anywhere really). We went to the rec center, we rode the water slide, we drove up and down the mountain, we watched birds, we swam in the ice cold creek for a bath and we had a blast, doing nothing and everything. + +[^1]: To me long term travel is really more a mindset of "I don't know when I'm going 'home'" than any length of time. diff --git a/durango2.txt b/durango2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6642ca8 --- /dev/null +++ b/durango2.txt @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +Every evening around 5 the thunder start in. You could set your watch by it. Except that there's no need for a watch up here. + +s evening the thunder gods have conspired to produce something a little extra. Thor is pounding a little harder, Zeus throwing a little more than usual, flash and the rolling peel of sound dying off to the east, down the mountain side. + +The rain is soft and steady, the kind that leaves no puddles here in the forest, much to my children's disappointment. Here all the water is captured, held in a bed of rotting needles, leaves, and the roots of rice grass, false oats and mountain parsley, then lower the roots of gambel oak and snow willows, and finally somewhere deeper still the pine roots get what is left. No water is wasted. Nothing remains on the surface of things. + +It is easy here to sink into the soil and disappear for a while, everything here is doing it, you are too. + +The valley wall opposite our camp has disappeared in a rainy mist of gray white nothingness. The light is fading prematurely, leaving a shadowless forest where darkness fades in rather than falling like a shadow. It is silence save the soft pelting of rain and the call and response of two hardy wood peewees, seemingly unfazed by the storm. + +And then some storm god throws another bolt and the silence is blasted apart. + +I am sitting here listening to the rain, feeling the pace of my chair sinking into the soil. It is a slow but steady rain, a slow but steady sinking. + +I am listening to the rain because that is what you do when it rains. + +In every place the rain sounds different. + +The rain that reaches down here does not do so directly, not much of it anyway. Most of it has hit at least one, probably hundreds, of pine needles on its way to the earth. These drops are small and soft because they have been broken up on their way down. By the time they hit the ground they are more alike than different, every drop having been similarly, but differently bounced through the pine canopy. The result is a steady even sound, broken up by the rougher splatter of rain coming through a gap in the canopy to land on oak leaves, or the split wood of the picnic table, or the roof of the bus. + +Somewhere out there is a forest. It's too dark now to see more than a few feet in front of me. There are two trees at the edge of what faint light the moon offers, locked away somewhere behind cloud. There's just enough glow that I can still make out the roughness of the tree bark and the curve of their trunks hint at the vastness of space behind them. Here next to the trunks the ground is still dry, whatever water has made it through the canopy is already down below the surface of the needles I'm lying on, staring up, trying to see the branches coming together above me. + +When you lie on your back and stare up at the trees running together up into the vastness of space and you can feel the planet spinning through the heavens and smell the warm fecundity of the soil, all the billons of microbes you're lying on churning their way through the seemingly endless supply of organic material of the forest, one day you. + +You can feel that vastness of existence and the minute intimacy of existence at the same time here in the forest. And it is impossible to tease apart all the links between everything micro and macro, do not even try. In one way you are you, the you you experience, in another you are the joining together of cells of that found it advantageous to become parts of a whole rather than go it alone -- which one is you? That's the wrong question. Know that all of this is you. All those solitary cells within you are now too specialized to survive without the rest of you, they gave up their individuality to all you to exist. As has already been pointed out, hundreds if not thousands of years before we had the language of microbes and devil of the details by the tail, the wiser among realized that the biggest thing is in the smallest thing. + +I think this is one of the principle realizations travel unfolds for you -- that there is no other. You are a part of a whole, interconnected and joined far more intimately to everything around you than you could ever hope to understand, though sometimes when you travel you feel it. You feel it when you are still somewhere for a while and start to sink into the soil. At the same time all is alien, your own + |